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I only looked at the first few locations on the list, but several of them were obviously blurred or pixelated -- the Naval Observatory in DC is a perfect blurry circle amid high-res imagery, and the Air Force Base listed as #4 looks like someone inserted a mosaic art piece over the image.

Did this guy really not look at these locations? Those were in the top five, and there are links to the Google Maps locations in question, for crying out loud.

I work at one of those facilities and know damn well that LAST YEAR a coarse resample was laid over the campus where I work. Google has recently [last two or 3 weeks i think] updated the imagery for eastern massachusetts. I know because my new neighbors house suddenly appeared in google satellite view and it went from winter imagery to summer...which is a huge drop in information, btw because of tree canopy. The newer images do not blur the facility I work at but then neither did the old ones when they first came out. Just give 'em time.

It's a well known fact that the imagery providers have to obscure certain things. Just because a few of the images mentioned in the story turned out to be unobscured later doesn't mean they weren't at the time of the writing. The images are updated quite regularly, and once Google's satalites start working it'll be even more freqent.

Yes, it's censorship to obscure the imagery, but it's a tough balance to strike. Yes, information wants to be free. And as a taxpayer, it could be argued that you have a right to see whatever your government has been spending your money on. But people in other countries do not. Furthermore, the plans and everything for most of these buildings are located in the bottom of a filing cabinet in a dark basement room with a sign on the door that says "Beware of Leopard". That said, it sure is cool to look at government stuff, and the imagery being available makes it real easy.

For me, it's fun to find black helicopers and such, but that's basically it. It's just fun to look at stuff. I like those 'eyeball' things over at cryptome.org [cryptome.org] also. The risk is pretty low that someone would be able to plan an operation or something with just the image data. So they take away the fun to hopefully mitigate a small amount of risk.

On the flip side (again), there seems to be so many secrets these days. Too many, if you ask me. But, hopefully they know what they're doing.

Soon people will be able to upload their own photos to the view, like in that Microsoft thing, but on a 3d globe like Google Earth. People taking photos from passenger airplanes and such. More private aerial photos and satellites with small resolution and lower latency. It will happen. Google is on the right track with GIS, I think it'll be the killer app of the 2010's. Google has the power to pull everything together, it might take a while but soon there will be a nice parallel universe inside their datacentres. Unfortunately in that world, it makes extreme paranoia as actionable as extreme information gathering.

Excellent points all. Further consideration: Regardless of what is produced by the application (Google Earth)there is no easy way to determine its legitimacy or accuracy. Just because an area isn't blurred doesn't mean what you're seeing is accurate. Oh, and I just checked the Chernobyl (Chornobyl) NPP, and the actual power plant and surrounding Zone of Alienation is still blurred.

I like to check out through google maps places I used to be stationed at while in the US Army over a decade ago, and I can clearly see how most roofs are showed as white rectangles, and antenna pads are whited out so you can't see in which direction they point. This is on both training facilities and in active duty stations.

In the case of a medevac heliport all you can see is whited out taxi areas and pads, while at the same level of detail in a civilian facility you can easily follow the lines pa

Can you give some examples? There are large swaths of super bright concrete at many US Army airfields, but I don't see anything that amounts to censorship. Which is strange, because the NSA HQ at Fort Meade, MA [google.com] is perfectly viewable (in high-res!), yet you say a basic Army base is classified.:)

"As Google has acknowledged in the past, there are spots, such as the U.S. Naval Observatoryâ"home for another 116 days to Vice President Dick Cheneyâ"that have been deliberately blurred or pixelated by the companies that sell aerial imagery to Google. (See image at left. You can click on this image and all of the images in this article to see larger versions.)"

So Google didn't censor it, the company selling them the images did, that's what the article says.

FWIW the Naval Observatory is blotted out in all satellite photos. It's my understanding that this is a "national security" requirement and (besides it being a no-fly zone) satellite and areal photography are required by federal law to obscure it. Since Google still buys most of these pictures from other people, I wouldn't blame Google for this one, per-say...

FWIW the Naval Observatory is blotted out in all satellite photos. It's my understanding that this is a "national security" requirement and (besides it being a no-fly zone) satellite and areal photography are required by federal law to obscure it.

Well... i guarantee that the percentage of aircraft with "No Hijacking" signs on them that don't get highjacked would have a significant number of 9's in it, so it obviously works and works well, provided you measure the outcomes correctly.

You're going to have to cite sources on the 'requirement' and 'federal law' claims. Many companies buy satellite imagery from Russian companies, so what exactly is this law and who is the burden on?

I wonder how many russian satellites have good coverage of the United States. Geostationary [wikipedia.org] satellites wouldn't have good coverage (at least for map-making of the United States, since they're following the equator and would view the United States at an angle). The russian satellites on the Molnya orbit wouldn't h

> I wonder how many russian satellites have good coverage of the United States.

Since 1992 it has been possible to purchase Resurs and Kometa imagery of the US through the state company Soyuzkarta. This required the declassification of the military Kometa's cameras - a 10-metre resolution topo and a 2-metre resolution mapping camera.

One of the first customers, and one which has been a reliable repeat customer, was the USAF. They used imagery of Washington to plan General Dolittle's cortege.

I suspect that most of these had been obscured at some point in the past, such as these natural gas tanks [google.com] in Boston. IIRC, they were quite pixelated a mere 6 months ago, but are no longer due to change in policy or whatnot. I remember noticing just a few of these (around Boston, of course), so I can't speak much against the others. But with that in mind, I think it's pretty unfair to discredit the 'Blurred Out' article; it may be outdated, but it's not necessarily a myth.

Abandoned amusement parks are usually prime real estate for evil geniuses, their evil projects, and their hordes of henchmen. It wouldn't surprise me that certain amusement parks are pixelated given the secrecy involved in taking over the planet.

Has anyone checked to see if all the good pubs are blurry? Maybe with a touch of double-vision and a few pink elephants? Also, if blurry images are proof of national security concerns, the sheep in New Zealand must be Above Top Secret to produce some of the limitations there.

The Whitehouses roof used to be blanked out with matte tan. Now it isn't. The pentagon also used to be blanked out. I looked at these locations myself a long time ago. More recently I was surprised to see them unblanked.

Maybe they realized that Washington and the surrounding area contain several tall structures that a potential terrorist could use to take pictures of the roofs of the buildings in questions without having to go through an internet service.

Or if you're the paranoid type, maybe they made them clear again but got Google to report anyone who looks at them, so they can feed that into their data mining programs.

Tom? Tom Clancy, you've made that point enough already, now stop teasing them.

(Seriously, the use of ground to air defenses around the white house is predicated on attacks by relatively small aircraft. High vulnerability scenarios include organized coup attacks on Marine 1 during take off or landing, probably by attack helicopter, as well as the more prosaic 'some psycho flying a small plane at the oval office and just hoping his target is in the right part of the building at the time' attack. Lone psycho a

That case was obvious censorship. Street view was up less than a year ago in Hyde Park, and then it just disappeared once Obama started to look more serious and once the secret service started to ramp up their efforts. Seems like if they are going to destroy an hour or two of work done by an actual person, they would have no problem blurring the work of a quick satellite passover.

I find it odd how the Perry nuclear power facility [google.com] in Lake County, Ohio was sensitive enough to be blurred for the longest time but Davis-Besse [google.com] and Fermi [google.com] just up the coast of Lake Erie were not.

I discovered today that Ramstein airbase in Germany (hugely important to US) is "whited out". At first I just thought it was a really big building, then I thought white concrete surfacing. Finally I realized that it was blacked out, but they tried to make it look like it wasn't. They even threw in a a few fake aircraft and shadows, but didn't quite make it past the uncanny valley. It's just a matter of time until they perfect the fabrication of imagery for those locations.

Yeah, I think the GP post is looking for a conspiracy where there isn't one. If you look at the Google version in the GP post, lots of other buildings' tops are saturated out by overexposure. The large expanse of saturated white with hints of shadow in question matches very nicely to, as the parent post put it, "a lot of pavement," or, maybe, a lot of concrete pavement. No trickery involved, just a badly exposed photo in the Google map.

Sorry, but that sounds like conspiracy talk. To me, the white area looks like just a big newly-constructed concrete ramp. I've been seen and been to a lot of airports, so I know what a ramp looks like.

If you look at the top and bottom, you see areas that are still under construction. Some taxiways and even portions of the runway are bright white. What possible reason reason could they have for "whiting out" the runway's threshold and blast pads? The overall white area doesn't look anything like a building and all the actual buildings are arranged around it, just like any other airport. If you scroll around a bit, you'll see other areas that are nearly white but plainly older because they have streaks of gray running through them.

Back in the day, I understand that satellite photos used infrared to generate fairly visually-accurate monochrome images of the ground. On those, thick forests and bodies of water should show up black while roofs and roads would be a lot lighter. I would take a wild guess that the satellites which capture images these days use infrared to enhance the visible light photo and brand-new concrete reflects a whole bunch of the sun's infrared back at the camera. This oversaturates that area on the picture and makes objects on the concrete difficult to see. But that's just a theory. I'd appreciate hearing from someone who knows how it really works.

Some of the newer bases, like the US CENTCOM complex in Qatar was designed to be low-observable from recce, electro-magnetic and optical. There are some good photos from back in '02 on globalsecurity's site under public eye.

It's not all due to nefarious Google-Corporate-Conspiracy. I know you guys like to think it's all one big giant conspiracy to keep nerds from ruling the Earth, but it's not true. Close up Google views are from airplane photos, not satellite photos. If airplanes can't fly over an area then you don't get good pictures of it. If the airplane photos belong to the government and they don't include them in the database, you don't get good pictures of it. It's as simple as that for most things. If something is del

I tried a couple toward the bottom of the list. The train station in White Plains, NY is indeed blurred, as is the GE campus in Schenectady.

Some locations in the vicinity of Goonhilly Downs in England used to be blurred, but they aren't any more. You might expect this from countries with different ideas on security and privacy, but places like Buckingham Palace and Vauxhall Cross show up just fine, and you can count how many subs are moored in Polyarnyy.

chemical weapons factory. I hope that the hidden area on the map doesn't drawn anyone's attention. And therein lies the problem with obscuring secret locations on maps. The mere act of obscuring it announces it.

The Niagara Falls power station and reservoir DID used to be blurred out. After seeing this article, I checked again and it is clear as day. Some corporate/government drone probably just adjusted the rules of what needs to be censored and what doesn't.

If censorship of google maps images is a myth, then so are evolution, global warming, and the round earth "theory".

There are plenty of areas that are obfuscated in Google Earth for reasons that are fairly clear.

What are the clear reasons? By blurring these overhead images, does it make the job of terrorists more difficult? Instead of hitting these targets with orbiting kinetic weapons, they have to resort to truck bombs? The deal is, any entity that is going to mount an offensive on these installations is going to do it in such an unsophisticated manner, that aerial photographs are unneccessary. Information about

Naval Operations Base Norfolk, VADoes anyone believe that the Truman, Enterprise, and Roosevelt have been in the same place for the last 3 years? Yet the are tied up at piers 11 & 12 with the Big E in a serious upkeep.Pier 22Same 4 SubmarinesNewport News Shipbuilding and Drydock2 more Nimitz class carriers, one in drydock (overhaul/new construction) and one tied to the pier fitting out after launching/overhaul.

Google has not changed these pictures since google maps added the satellite view.

so you think Google spent twice the amount of money to use 2 separate satellite imaging services? or that they use two disparate censorship policies, so that if the government asks them to obfuscate the VP's residence they would only comply for one service but not the other?

i don't know if the summary is correct or not, but logic would suggest that Google would use the same satellite images for both sets of aerial maps, and if they were going to blur out a location in one service it would be done to the other as well.